There are quite a few types of vegetables that benefit from an early start. Seeds from tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, celery, cabbage, and artichoke can be started indoors (or in a greenhouse) several weeks before your last frost. This helps extend your growing season and gives you healthy, established plants to put …

Tag: vegetables
Ready to Plant? Vegetable Transplant Care 101
Seed Buying 101: What’s on the Packet?
Is anything more exciting than choosing the seeds for your garden? There are so many wonderful varieties to choose from, and the photos and descriptions make each one seem better than the last. But sometimes it can be challenging to figure out what all the different technical terms mean. Do you …
Is It Spring Yet? February Garden Checklist
Depending on where you live, February is the time when most of us are still dealing with cold temperatures and impatiently waiting for spring. Growing zones 5 and below are still too cold to start seeds, and it may seem like there isn’t a lot to do in the garden. …
Summer’s Bounty for Winter’s Table: Long-Term Storage Crops
While our great-grandmothers had root cellars to keep many crops from spoiling, many of us have access to an unheated garage, crawl space, or basement room that will do the job just as well. Storing Fall crops like squash, potatoes, apples, and onions will save you both time and money! …
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Preventing Garden Pests the Natural Way
There are few things more discouraging than spending countless hours planting and weeding a garden, only to have it decimated by harmful insects. We’ll discuss ways to get rid of pests in a minute, but first let’s go over the steps you can take to keep them out of your …
Planting A Fall Garden in Summer
One of the best ways to extend your harvest is by planting a second crop to harvest at the very end of the growing season. Many vegetables thrive in the cooler temperatures of early Fall and will perform even better than if they had been planted in the Spring. What are …
5 Ways to Care For Your Summer Garden
You made it through the spring garden season! All your plants are thriving, you may even be harvesting early crops by now. But even though spring seeding and planning felt busy, summer is actually the busiest time of year for the gardener. Here are five simple tips to help you …
Grow Your Own Salad Mix: Lettuce and More!
We’ve all purchased those handy bags of salad mix at the grocery store, with the usual blend of iceberg lettuce, carrot shreds, and red cabbage. There’s something to be said for convenience and time-saving, but what if you could step right outside your door and find a perfect blend of salad …
Bringing Back the Kitchen Garden – Companion Planting
We’ve all seen and fallen in love with those pictures of old-fashioned kitchen gardens: vegetables and flowers and herbs all mixed together in a glorious mix of color and textures. It turns out that those early gardeners were on to something! Not only are these combinations of different plants a delight to …
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Companion Planting Flowers with Vegetables
It’s that exciting time of year when seeds we planted in little pots are growing bigger by the day, and soon we’ll be able to move them outside to the garden. Maybe we’ve even direct-seeded some hardy varieties. But before we get too many vegetables in the ground, we might …
Growing Vegetables in Containers
Container Gardening Not everyone has enough room on their property for a vegetable garden, and for some with limited mobility it may simply be too much work. For those who want to grow fresh produce without tearing up the yard or breaking a sweat, there’s container gardening! When most of …
How Many Plants Do I Really Need?
How Many Plants Do I Really Need? When starting seeds for a vegetable garden, it’s easy to get swept away in our excitement and plant dozens of each variety. Two months later we’re staring at a sea of plants that need to be transplanted, and there’s not enough room in …
Buy seeds, Not Plants
Buy Seeds, Not Plants Sometimes growing from seed is not just an option—it’s a necessity. The spectacle of a cilantro plant in a 4-inch pot with the …
Germination Station – Lighting Your Seedlings
Germination Station – DIY Indoor Seed Starting Putting a few pots of seeds in a sunny South-facing window may be fine, but for those wanting to start enough seeds for a larger garden, we need a Germination Station! The simplest method is to buy a heavy-duty wire shelving unit. This …
What You Need Before You Seed
What You Need Before You Seed – Choosing Containers A trip to any garden center or gardening website can be overwhelming with all the choices offered. Should you start seeds in trays, peat pots, jiffy pellets, or plastic pots? Should you make your own compostable pots with a nifty tool …